Vibranium, the wonder-element of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is pretty amazing. It absorbs and stores vast amounts of energy, dissolves metals and can induce mutations in living things. No wonder it’s the material of choice for superheroes and villains alike, being found in Captain America’s shield, Black Panther’s suit, and the bodies of Vision and Ultron.

But where might you expect to find it on the periodic table?

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If this sounds like a silly question, spare a thought for the 39 students who had to answer it as part of a university-level chemistry exam earlier this year. It’s easy to imagine the surprise (or horror) the undergraduate chemists of Lawrence Technological University in Michigan, US, may have felt when asked to place the fictional element in the periodic table during their exam. Fortunately for us, the chemists behind the question, Dr Sibrina Collins and Professor LaVetta Appleby, have now documented the students’ responses – along with the opinion of an expert inorganic chemist – in a letter published in the Journal of Chemical Education.

So how exactly would you go about placing vibranium in the periodic table? The first port of call is to give vibranium a chemical symbol. “Vb” was the most common suggestion, the transition metal vanadium having already claimed “V”.

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As for its position, Collins says the key is to look at vibranium’s properties and compare these to other elements, as elements in the same group tend to have similar features. One of the most remarkable features of the periodic table is its predictability and consistency; the scientist who first developed it, Dmitri Mendeleev, famously left gaps that correctly (in most cases) predicted the properties and atomic masses of elements that had yet to be discovered.

A common answer among the students was to place vibranium near the bottom of the periodic table. As of January 2016, the seventh row of the periodic table was completed with the addition of four new elements, so a new element could begin an entirely new row. Vibranium’s likely location near the bottom of the table would also, in the words of one student, make it a “very heavy” element. All agreed that vibranium would likely be located in the middle section of the periodic table, where the majority of metals are located.

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Heavier elements, students noted, tend to be radioactive, making it possible that vibranium is as well. Black Panther also shows vibranium’s strong mutagenic properties (i.e. it changes genetic material), which could be indicative of radioactivity. One student observed that in the film, vibranium “glows a blueish purple”, which resembles other radioactive elements like uranium. The same student also pointed to Wakanda’s use of vibranium as an energy source to support their claim. The expert the authors spoke to agreed, claiming that vibranium would almost certainly be “in radioactive land”.

The same expert suggested that vibranium’s amazing capacity to absorb sound and other vibrations (say, a hit from Thor’s hammer) would require “elaborate structures”, which are a common feature in the boron group in the periodic table. Meanwhile, one student picked up on the strength and hardness of vibranium, suggesting a close proximity to the same group as chromium, the hardest metal we know.

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Collins, who is executive director of LTU’s Marburger STEM Center, says the fictional element was a good way of getting students to think seriously about the periodic table. “It lets us talk about parts of the table not normally covered in undergraduate courses,” she says. “I’d have been thrilled with a question like that as a student.”

“Usually when I teach the unit on the periodic table… students don't seem to be very excited,” says Appleby, a senior lecturer in chemistry at LTU. But the students were “huge Marvel fans” and had been discussing the movie before class for weeks. In fact, she says, another set of students, who hadn’t sat the exam, heard about it and asked to be involved. “I couldn't believe how engaged they were.”

In their paper, the authors also write that Black Panther provides a good opportunity to discuss diversity in STEM, with King T’Challa’s sister Shuri, who leads Wakanda’s tech lab, offering “a shining example for the next generation of STEM leaders.”